关键词: 语言景观; 符号景观; 地理符号学; 公共空间; 标牌

Abstract: As a brand-new research field of sociolinguistics, the study of linguistic landscape interprets the relationship between language and space by means of analyzing the variety of linguistic signs in public space such as public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings, which in general can be divided into top-down signs and bottom-up signs and which are equipped with informative function and symbolic function. The article reviews the chronological development of linguistic landscape studies at home and abroad, expounds the research contents in detail which contain Linguistic Landscape in a narrow sense represented by Landry & Bourhis (1997), Gorter (2006a, 2006b) and Backhaus (2007) , Semiotic Landscape by Jaworski & Thurlow (2010a, 2010b) and Geosemiotics by Scollon & Scollon (2003), and has a thorough and in-depth discussion about theoretical and methodological argumentations of this study in the following five aspects of (1) the samples’ representativeness and scope, (2) the sample’s unit of analysis, (3) the samples’ categorizations, (4) the signs’ authorship, primary functions and intended readers, and (5) quantitative or qualitative analysis. This study reflects the diverse linguistic phenomena in terms of language conflict, language contact, language maintenance, language change and ethnolinguistic vitality, so on and so forth, which demonstrate overt or covert linguistic prestige, power relations and social status embodied in the language use and language choice. In the end, the article puts forward personal views about the prospective linguistic landscape studies in China.

Keywords: linguistic landscape; semiotic landscape; geosemiotics; public space; signs